This essay considers the unique disability narratives in two contemporary international films, Princess Mononoke (USA, 1999; Mononoke Hime, Japan, 1997, Miyazaki Hayao), and The Good Woman of Bangkok (Australia, 1991, Dennis O'Rourke) to investigate the formation of national identity and the negotiation of international exchange. We explore the intervention of subaltern subjects through a discussion of Mononoke's gender and feralness juxtaposed with the social positioning of prostitutes and lepers in Princess Mononoke, as well as through an intersectional analysis of Yaiwalak Chonchanakun's gender, visual impairment, and prostitute status in Good Woman. While these narratives are enacted upon different historical stages, both films display a similar logic that positions modern society above nature or any pre-existing civilizations-a logic solidified by specific deployments of disability and other subaltern designations.

Disability studies scholarship has developed strong critiques of many oppressive strategies developed under the auspices of modernity to diagnose, exile, institutionalize, normalize, or rehabilitate people with non-normative bodies and minds.1 Characterized by a near-obsession with order and progress, people with impairments have been either actual targets or positioned as the symbolic focus of many modernization projects. Drawing from European and U.S. disability history and representations, for example, Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy traces various ways in which the very development of the modern concept of normalcy has been based upon contrastive cultural meanings of disability.2 Modernity, in other words, has depended upon the existence of disability to draw the boundaries between accepted and rejected subjects. Socially positioned outside the parameters of cognitive and physical normalcy, people with disabilities in modern Western contexts almost inevitably have been caught up in systems of charity, rehabilitation, or institutional confinement. Postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty makes this clear in Habitations of Modernity by asserting that the "origins of modernity" and the historical process of becoming modern were not benign: "The fact that one is often ushered into modernity as much through violence as through persuasion is recognized by European historians and intellectuals. The violence of the discourse of public health in nineteenth-century England directed itself against the poor and the working classes."3 Yet even as disability-studies scholars have developed critiques of modernity's oppressive medical, rehabilitative, and normalizing processes-especially those targeting the bodies of people with disabilities-these discussions have primarily focused upon situations in industrialized nations. …